So you've inherited your grandmother's precious dolls, which she cherished, but you can't stand them because they look so creepy. You aren't alone, as many people end up with dolls that are ugly, haunted, or give off uncanny valley vibes. You could toss them, but that's neither respectful to Grandma nor is it environmentally-friendly. What to do?
Sara and Brian have found their niche in recycling. They run a program called Unsettling Toy Removal and Rehoming, in which they take in your unwanted dolls and offer them to people who are not so bothered. If you're interested, you can look through the dolls that are available, or for a real horror show, see the permanent collection.
Note: video may be NSFW due to the presence of a medical dummy named Maria.
-via Boing Boing
The 1995 teen comedy Clueless was a big hit and is now considered one of the best teen movies of all time. What? From the comments at YouTube, it's apparent that Clueless is cherished as a work of art by the Millennials who watched it as teens. However, if all you know about the film is what is in this Honest Trailer, that can be mystifying.
Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) is pretty well known for his cool and entertaining stunts, which have only gotten bigger over the years. This time he's going for the world record in shooting elephant toothpaste into the air. But this video is about so much more than that. It's the story of the elephant toothpaste, alright, both his past failures and the new project. But it also involves some debunking of certain internet videos, a jet ride, a pool with a foam slide, a pool filled with millions of orbeez, and a rainbow of devil's toothpaste.
It's also the story of a young cancer survivor and how the community came together to make the best surprise party ever for him. Together, all that justifies the length of this video. -via Fark
The Romans were all about pomp and circumstance. That's why we have arenas today. However, among the chariot races and gladiator fights, one annual ritual stands out for its bizarreness, in which a lucky duck, er, goose is honored at the expense of a few good bois.
On a warm summer day in August in ancient Rome, a brilliantly decorated litter is carried solemnly in the direction of Circus Maximum. Its occupant is neither a senator nor a highborn lady, but upon arrival at his destination he is revealed to be a humble goose, and he had arrived at the venue, now seated on a luxurious purple cushion, to watch the crucifixion of some dogs.
This macabre ritual, called supplicia canum (or “punishment of the dogs”) is celebrated to commemorate the anniversary of a traumatic episode in the history of Rome—the sacking of the city by the Gauls in 390 BC or 387 BC. Supplicia canum is supposed to serve as warning to dogs not to fall asleep on guard duty. In the same procession, geese were decked out in gold and purple, and carried in honor for alerting the last defenders of the city from falling into the hands of the Gauls.
It's hard to believe anyone took the "warning" to the dogs seriously, but the ceremony might have served some purpose in teaching Rome's military history, which makes us glad we have documentation and schools and books from which to learn history. You can learn the circumstances of the sacking of Rome that led to the supplicia canum at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen)
AskReddit is a never-ending source of stories that range from delightful to cringeworthy. Graceful_Swan_Ronson asked servers, "what's the most ridiculous request you've gotten from a customer at your restaurant?" Of more than 3000 comments, there are quite a few gems.
1. "A mom and her eight-year-old son came into the restaurant I waited tables at for lunch. The mom asked her son what he wanted to eat, and he replied 'ranch.' I politely asked if he meant a salad with ranch? Or French fries with a side of ranch? The woman looked at me and clarified he wanted a soup bowl full of ranch dressing."
"I walked into the kitchen and discussed with my manager because I had no idea how to charge them for a bowl of ranch dressing. We came to the conclusion that we should charge them for an entire bottle of ranch, so she paid $10.99 for a soup bowl full of ranch dressing. Yuck."
-Dpg2304
18. "I had a customer ask where the lobster was from that we used in our lobster bisque. According to him, he was allergic to shellfish...but only shellfish that comes from a certain ocean."
-erikarew
But they aren't all weird orders. One story was simply a hilarious miscommunication.
8. "I was at the Cheesecake Factory with a friend who ordered a 'coffee with Bailey's in it' for dessert. It took ages, but eventually the server comes back with a cup of coffee containing two bay leaves. I can only imagine how confused they were putting that one together."
Read a roundup of the funniest orders taken at restaurants at Buzzfeed.
(Image credit: Joi)
Daniel Lambert was born in Leicester, England, in 1770. That was a time when only the rich could always get enough to eat, and stoutness was an admirable quality, since it signaled one's more-than-adequate wealth. But Lambert wasn't upper class; he worked at the local jail, like his father before him. And when he was a young adult, he gained a lot of weight. Lambert became a local celebrity for his girth, and showed off his athletic ability as he participated in sports, especially hunting- until he got too heavy to ride a horse.
Morose about his weight, Lambert became a recluse and shut himself up in his house. In the meantime, stories of his bulk had spread far and wide and curious visitors came to Leicester and used various pretexts to visit his home. Lambert kept away from public eye as much as possible. He also refused to allow himself to be weighed. His friends once tricked him into getting into a carriage on the pretext of going to a cock fight. Once he had squeezed his way into the carriage, the rest of the party drove the carriage onto a large scale and jumped out. By deducting the weight of the previously weighed empty carriage, they calculated that Lambert now weighed 320 kg, making him officially the heaviest person in history, surpassing the previous record-holder, Edward Bright.
That's 705 pounds! In 1806, Lambert decided to make a living by putting himself on exhibition. He become famous nationwide, and even received a visit from King George III. Read the story of Daniel Lambert at Amusing Planet.
According to Know Your Meme, the "milk create challenge" got its start on August first and went viral. The problem with the milk crate challenge is that everyone falls, and many have been injured. Engineering professor Dr. Nehemiah Mabry explains how humans aren't made to negotiate this type of structure. Oh, you might be able to stand on two stacked milk crates, as a short person with high shelves can tell you, but anything more is way too risky.
This is a warning: just because a challenge is fairly impossible doesn't mean you'll get any kind of acclaim if you accomplish it. More likely, you'll hurt or possibly kill yourself trying, and even if you are successful, you'll be contributing to other people's injuries as they try to emulate you. -via Digg
Taquille is a Peruvian island in Lake Titicaca. The 1,300 people who live there have some unique cultural traditions developed over centuries of semi-isolation from the mainland. One of those developed from knitting.
Both men and women knit, but men in particular knit woolen caps called chullos. The colors and patterns are codes that describe the wearer. Women evaluate potential mates based on the quality of their knitted chullos. BBC Travel interviewed residents about this practice:
According to Alejandro, the sign of good partner is one who can make a pin-tight chullo – one knitted so well that it is able to hold water over large distances when turned upside down. Would-be fathers-in-law often test the chullos of their daughters' potential husbands in this way. Alejandro proudly explained that his chullo could hold water for up to 30m without losing a single drop, and was impressive enough to attract his wife, Teodosia Marca Willy, 44 years ago.
"She saw good skills apparently in my chullo. I used to make a really good hat; I was a good knitter," he said.
The girls look for the best chullo. So if you're wearing a good hat, you've got more [chances] to get a girlfriend earlier and faster," added Juan, explaining that it's often a community spectacle when the father-in-law checks the knitting quality of would-be grooms. "[When] the father-in-law [pours] the water in the chullo, then the groom has to be able to show the water in the chullo to everyone that is gathering there. All the family gathered have to be able to see the water in the hat," he said.
-via Messy Nessy Chic | Photo: Inter-American Foundation
Dave Kloc got his start in poster art by making 310 posters for the stand-up comedy television series The Meltdown that aired from 2010 to 2016. Now, art posters for a television show are not really a thing, and neither are posters for standup comedy night, but when Kloc went to a show, he was assigned the job.
“A friend of mine named Jordan Vogt-Roberts invited me to a comedy show in the back of a comic-book store,” Kloc tells me over the phone. “It turned out to be the first ‘Meltdown’ show. It wasn’t like a typical comedy club, a two-drink-minimum kind of place,” Kloc says of the 175-seat NerdMelt Showroom behind Meltdown Comics on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. “It had a very different vibe. I went up to one of the hosts, Jonah Ray, and said, ‘This feels like an old punk show. You should do some posters.’ He said, ‘Do you do posters?’ I didn’t, but I knew how. So I said ‘Yeah,’ he said ‘Great,’ and after I figured out where to get paper and stuff like that, I did roughly a poster a week for more than six years.”
That takes chutzpah. Sow how did Kloc end up as a renowned artist of posters for concerts? While Kloc had never designed posters before The Meltdown, he did have some art training back in Michigan where he grew up. He interests were art, hockey, and music. Kloc, a bass player, quit his band, moved to Los Angeles in 2008, and became a tour manager for other musicians.
While the work was steady, it was not 52-weeks-a-year steady, which meant Kloc would find himself at loose ends between tours for weeks at a time. “One time after I got off the road,” he says, “I went to a concert at a little gallery called Nomad’s, which also turned out to be a screenprinting shop. It was the coolest place.” Kloc made a deal with the owner, Damon Robinson, to tidy up around the shop and generally help out in exchange for learning how to screenprint. “He taught me the ins and outs of screenprinting,” Kloc says of Robinson, “and I helped him print a lot of gig posters.”
Kloc’s experience with Robinson was the reason he found himself saying “yes” to Jonah Ray at that first “Meltdown” show when Ray asked Kloc if he made posters. In turn, Kloc’s experience as the poster guy for “Meltdown” eventually allowed him to make a few gig posters of his own.
“I still had all the contacts I’d made from years of touring, I still talked to those guys,” Kloc says. “As I got better at making posters, it became reasonable for me to ask if they needed one for an upcoming tour.”
They did. In fact, by the time of Kloc’s last “Meltdown” poster in October of 2016, he was already pivoting to a second career as a gig-poster artist, printing his work from a windowless janitor’s closet in an apartment building near downtown L.A. “It was just a piece of wood clamped to a table,” Kloc says of his makeshift press. “It would be 90 degrees outside, which in L.A. is not uncommon, and 110 in the closet. Between screens, I’d stand outside with my shirt off to cool down, questioning every decision I’d ever made in my life before going back inside to face the heat and humidity. If I needed 30 good posters, I had to print 50. It was awful, but I printed posters there for years.”
Read about Kloc's art and see plenty of gorgeous posters at Collectors Weekly.
Ambergris, the rare effluvia of a tiny minority of sperm whales, occasionally washes up on the beach and makes someone quite wealthy. Although perfumers now use a synthetic version, the real thing is rare enough to be prized. It's been that way for hundreds of years, as ambergris' many uses were known a long time before its origin was pinpointed.
Though ambergris has been traded since at least the Middle Ages, we still know remarkably little about the substance. Even the fact that it originates from sperm whales is a relatively recent discovery. For hundreds of years—even as beachcombers were finding ambergris washed up on shore and sailors were recovering the substance from carcasses—naturalists and physicians treated the theory that whales produce ambergris as outlandish. Ninth-century Muslim travel writers proposed that whales likely consume a substance produced elsewhere and later regurgitate it, a view that remained in circulation for several centuries.
The Hortus Sanitatis, an encyclopedia of herbal medicines published in 1491, cited theories that ambergris was tree sap, a type of sea foam, or some kind of fungus. In the 12th century, reports from China suggested ambergris was dried dragon spittle. It has at various times been proposed to be a fruit, fish liver, or a precious stone. According to a 2015 paper from the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, “By 1667, eighteen different theories existed on this matter and various animals were considered producers of this substance—including seals, crocodiles, and even birds.”
While we now know that ambergris is produced by a whale's gut, the exact process is still being debated. However, the global trade in ambergris and the clandestine ways it continues today is quite a story in itself, which you can read at Hakai magazine. -via Smithsonian
Richard Branson's trip to near-space in July wasn't quite the picture-perfect flight we were led to believe at the time. The Federal Aviation Administration gave the company notice that all their space flights will be put on hold until an investigation is completed. So what happened?
Indeed, the Unity 22 flight, as far as we knew until now, seemed to go exactly as planned, but as the New Yorker article reveals, pilots David Mackay and Mike Masucci ignored warning lights during the ascent. Specifically, the pilots brushed off an “entry glide cone warning,” which indicated that VSS Unity wasn’t climbing steeply enough and that the spaceplane wouldn’t have enough energy to glide back to the designated runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico.
And by flying outside of this cone-shaped volume of space, the spaceplane strayed beyond the mandated airspace for the mission, which it did for 1 minute and 41 seconds. This is a big no-no for the FAA, who enforces these rules.
The New Yorker article suggests the pilots should’ve aborted the mission when the warning lights came on. The warning should’ve served like the discouraging Monopoly card: Go directly to runway jail, do not pass into orbital space, and do not collect $200. Had the pilots done that, however, Richard Branson would probably not have been the first billionaire to reach space—especially given that Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos achieved the same feat just a few weeks later. Instead of aborting the mission, however, the pilots allowed VSS Unity’s engines to go at full throttle for the required one full minute.
This grounding will put some would be space tourists, willing to shell out $450,000 each for a flight, on hold for now. Read more about the kerfuffle at Gizmodo.
Measuring scales go back into antiquity. The act of balancing an unknown quantity with a known quantity of weight is the simplest way to measure weight and assign value to goods for sale. Archaeologists have found evidence of these known quantities all over the world. One such find in Jerusalem appears to have quite a story.
Found in the northern part of the City of David in Jerusalem's Old City and dating back to 2,700 years ago during the First Temple period, the weight in question is just 14 mm. in diameter and 12 mm. in height, and is only the second one of its kind to have been found in Israel. Made of hard limestone, the it contained engravings indicating it has a weight of two gerah, which equals 0.944 grams.
Despite this, however, the weight does not weigh two gerah. Rather, the researchers found that it weighed at least 3.61 grams, over three times as much.
Researchers believe traders used the weight to scam people. For example, if someone brought in their gold jewelry to sell, they could set six gerah of gold on the scale and be paid for only two gerah. This was apparently a problem in the ancient world, as several places in the Bible warn against the sin of using misleading weights and measures. Read more about the find at The Jerusalem Post. -via Strange Company
This holds major Studio Ghibli vibes! Indonesian wildlife photographer Ajar Setiadi takes photographs of frogs that live in his garden. His images reveal the fascinating behavior these amphibians exhibit. Setiadi treats the animals as pets, letting them frolic in his garden as he watches them play with the flowers. According to the photographer, capturing their small moments on camera is a miracle:
In one image, a frog in the rain holds up a leaf like an umbrella, and in another, two frogs appear to dance together. There’s one image in particular that stands out as the most charming, though: Setiadi managed to capture two frogs huddling together, sheltering from the rain under a flower umbrella. Frogs are social creatures, and this emotional image looks just like a loved-up couple or two friends who are looking out for one another during the rainstorm. Setiadi commented on the sweet scene: “I could only get a few frames because this moment can't be repeated.”
Check out Setiadi’s frog images below and find more from his portfolio on Instagram. When he’s not photographing frogs, he’s capturing the intimate lives of insects, birds, and reptiles.
Image credit: Ajar Setiadi
Time to sharpen up your Smash Bros. skills! Zen Family Dental in Ashland, Massachusetts is offering a rare promotion that lets Smash Bros. players claim a ‘free dental clean’ if they beat its resident dentist, Dr. Tej A. Shah in a match. I wonder who Dr. Shah mains? Is it Dr. Mario? Maybe it’s one of the newest DLC additions, Sephiroth! According to NintendoLife, the dentist’s favorite game is Final Fantasy.
Image credit: Nintendo
Look, animals are cute. They’re also in a league of their own. Animals have their own thing, and sometimes we humans cannot understand or comprehend what they’re doing, and you know what, that’s okay. We can just laugh it off or take a photo and post it on the Internet for fun. That is exactly what Doggo Taxi does! The Instagram account shares random animal photos with no context at all. Some of them are funny, and some of them just make you ask: ‘what in the world happened here?’ Bored Panda compiled 50 photos from that account. Check it here!
Image credit: doggo_taxi
